A Big Victory For Torture

One of the bigger hooleys on the Intertoobz at the moment involves trying to decide whether or not Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty is, in whole or in part, a brief for the efficacy of torture as demonstrated by the successful pursuit of Osama bin Laden as depicted in the film. (I remain agnostic until I see the damn thing, but Greg Mitchell, who has, says he's convinced that Bigelow and her screenwriter are playing both ends against the middle in a particularly noxious way.) But, while all that's going on, and the Oscar buzz builds, actual torture won a big victory.

In a significant victory for government prosecutors, the military judge presiding over the trial of accused 911 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed has granted a government request to treat as classified any testimony or discussion about the alleged torture of Mr. Mohammed and others during CIA interrogations. The judge, US Army Col. James Pohl, issued a broad protective order barring the disclosure of any information deemed by the government to be classified. The ruling was handed down Dec. 6 and was made public on the court's website on Wednesday.

Advertisement - Continue Reading Below

In other words, sucker, we will torture people on your behalf and then move heaven and earth to ensure that you don't have to worry your sweet little heads about the details, unless, of course, you fork over twelve bucks to see a largely fictionalized portrayal of it at the local megaplex. We will engage in methods contrary to everything we allegedly stand for as a country, violate a handful of treaties into the bargain, adopt methods for which we hung Japanese soldiers 60 years ago, and then bring to trial the people on whom we practiced those methods, all the while "classifying" the details. I hope Santa brings Colonel-Judge Pohl a new kangaroo suit for Christmas.

Judge Pohl defended his protective order, saying his ruling did not decide pending issues of relevance, materiality, or admissibility. "The ... protective order neither expands the traditional rules of discovery nor addresses what use, if any, can be made of the disclosed information during the course of a trial," he wrote. "Rather, it provides the framework for defense counsel to obtain and assess classified information while at the same instance permitting the government to preserve information relevant to our national security." The judge also approved the continued use of a 40-second delay to the courtroom audio made available to members of the media and others viewing the trial behind thick, soundproof glass. The 40-second delay gives government censors time to cut off any audio broadcast of the trial in the event that classified information is uttered or otherwise revealed in open court. The order also gives censors the authority to cut off the audio when they suspect classified information is about to be revealed.

Most Popular

They can mute the proceedings if they only "suspect" something might be revealed. Which, of course, will be always.

Meanwhile, back on the mainland, Congress is going to get a look at a super-secret CIA report on the stuff that was done in our name. Early reaction is not promising.

California Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who leads the Senate Intelligence Committee that's meeting Thursday, told NPR in an email that her 6,000-page report is "comprehensive," "strictly factual" and "the most definitive review of the CIA program to be conducted." Sen. Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the committee, has a different view. "This draft report contains a number of significant errors and omissions about the history and the utility of the CIA's detention and interrogation program," he says. "It's really not surprising, given the fact that the review was conducted without interviewing any of the people involved. It was taken solely from written documents." Chambliss and several other Republicans on the panel backed away from the investigation. And few - if any - of them are expected to vote to approve the report.

If the debate is limited to "does it work?," the country already is sunk to its eyeballs in a moral quagmire. Not that Chambliss would care.

There are many problems with torture. One of them is that it is so incompatible with our basic values as we profess them that we have to turn our legal system into a hall of mirrors in order to find a place for torture in our institutions of justice. (There is a similar, lesser dynamic at work as we try, and fail, to find a place for the death penalty in there.) Our efforts at doing so make a sad comic spectacle of us, our professed values, and those institutions that allegedly flow from them. We make ourselves look ridiculous because we have aided and abetted brutality. We are hypocrites in the eyes of the world and, at some level, we know it. Judge Pohl isn't protecting anything but our own wounded national conscience, which we willingly strapped to the waterboard ourselves. I'm not even entirely sure it's worth saving at this point.